The Hobbit in Yiddish

Today’s eccentric item: How The Hobbit Learned Yiddish from Jewniverse. Computer programmer Barry Goldstein translated the book for fun, the work being “much less stressful than wrestling with a recalcitrant computer.

“This translation marks the books 61st language,” Jewniverse reports. “ . . . Tolkien was enamored of mythology (he disdained Esperanto precisely because it lacked legends), and so it is perhaps fitting that a language so rich in stories should spin the tale of The Hobbit.”